The man who stopped the trains to Auschwitz: George Mantello, El Salvador, and Switzerland's finest hour
A biography of Mantello, born in 1901 to the Orthodox Jewish family of Mandl in Transylvania. As a businessman, he became honorary consul of El Salvador for several East European countries; in 1942-45 he served as first secretary of the El Salvador consulate in Geneva. With the approval of the consul general, Mantello provided thousands of Jews in Hungary and Transylvania with protective papers. In addition, during 1941-44 he gathered information on the Nazi Final Solution, including operations at Auschwitz. In 1944, using this data, he initiated two press campaigns in Switzerland which alerted that country and the entire world to the Nazi genocide of Jews. The first press campaign forced Horthy to stop the deportations. Dwells, also, on the activities of Florin Manoliu, a Romanian businessman who helped Mantello. During the war, Mantello was arrested several times by Swiss authorities on superficial pretexts. After an inquiry into his wartime activities in the 1950s, Mantello was forgotten and recalled only shortly before his death in 1992.